This weekend’s a big one for me, I’ve been cleaning out anything and everything in the home office. As I was dumping out piles and piles of CDs and DVDs containging drivers, games, videos, archived data and more, I figured I needed a better way to store all this. Rather than buy yet another binder to store them all in, I’m going a different route - archiving them all to ISO format on a big external HDD. So long as they aren’t copy protected, it’s easy enough to do -

1 - Grab a copy of LC ISO Creator (it’s free and easy). There are dozens of other freebie ISO makers, I just like this one for ease of use.

2- Get yourself a big external (or internal) HDD and create an ISO folder on it. Remember that DVD ISO’s can be up to 4GB, so prep a drive with tons of room.

3. Pop the disc into your drive, fire up ISO Creator and follow the steps (with LC, there’s only two steps!) to generate an ISO.

The ISO will be a single file that’s like a photograph of the discs contents. It contains all the data from the disc, laid out exactly like the disc was. But, to access that data later, you’ll need a program to “mount” the ISO as a virtual CD/DVD drive. I’m partial to Virtual Clone Drive from Slysoft, which is again free and easy to use. You just double click an ISO file, and your PC will treat it just like a CD/DVD drive. When you’re done, you go into My Computer, right click on the virtual drive and hit “Unmount” and you’re all set.

What do do with all those discs after you’ve copied them over? If it’s a disc I’m sure I won’t need the physical version of again (like a data backup, driver disc, etc), I just put a giant scratch on the reading surface (the opposite side the label is on) or break the disc in half, then toss it.

By creating ISO’s on a local or portable drive, you can easily find the discs you need when you need them, rather than pore through a huge binder (or four binders, in my case) of years of CD’s.

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It’s not too long, depending on the speed of your optical drive. Plus, it’s not processor intensive, so it’s pretty quick. I find 2-3 minutes max on a CD ROM, 5-10 minutes for a full DVD, though typically closer to 5 minutes for a DVD than the 10 side.